Ubuntu Studio 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Released!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Ubuntu Studio team hereby would like to introduce the new Ubuntu Studio release--Ubuntu Studio 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is now officially released!

From the release notes of Ubuntu Studio 12.10 Quantal Quetzal:
New Features in Ubuntu Studio 12.10

Ubuntu Studio is the Ubuntu flavour designed for content creation.

It’s produced as a DVD image that can also be converted to an USB stick and includes support for most languages by default.

Improved Interface:

A new web page is out. The help button on the main menu points there.

Task Manager has been switched to System Monitor for better memory use display.

A main menu tool has been added to setting to allow the user to change their menu.

Add/fix text plymouth theme for those video cards that won’t see graphics so it says Ubuntu studio.

Set up Software Center menu items for our workflows.

Fixed submenu icons for accessories, education and network.

New software include:

Xfce updated to version 4.10 (based off of Xubuntu)

Kernel (lowlatency) is now of version 3.5

Ubuntu Studio Applications

The menu has been fixed moving audio production tools out of Media Playback.

A MIDI router and MIDI tools menu have been added.

Add qmidiroute to audio workflow to cover missing functionality

Added open-clip-art package to graphics seed

Move mixer applications from media playback menu to audio menu.

Nautilus is default file manager for everything now

Common Infrastructure

Secure Boot

Ubuntu 12.10 is the first Ubuntu release to support UEFI Secure Boot, a standard for controlling what software can be run on a computer in an effort to curtail malware that takes over the system at boot time. Supporting Secure Boot, a part of the Windows 8 certification requirements for client systems, ensures that Ubuntu will continue to provide an “it just works” experience on new hardware.

Due to time pressures, only some flavors released with 12.10 will install and boot on Secure Boot hardware:

Ubuntu desktop

Ubuntu server

Edubuntu

We expect to enable all other flavors in 13.04.
Migration-support deprecated

The tool responsible for migrating user accounts from other operating systems to Ubuntu (migration-assistant) has been removed from the installer.
Linux kernel 3.5.5

Transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering

Collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor

Homogenizing the entire linux-meta package

Arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor

Changing of the default scheduler from cfq to deadline

Packaging updates for signed kernels

Python 3.2

The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop and their dependent libraries have been ported to Python 3. In most cases, Python 3 versions of libraries are available alongside their Python 2 counterparts. Ported applications will only run with Python 3. Work will continue in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

Ubuntu 12.10 ships OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation. This brings improved performance, new features and better compatibility with other Java 7 implementations.

Use of the OpenJDK6 is now deprecated and the openjdk-6-* packages in universe for Ubuntu 12.10 will not be provided in future releases of Ubuntu.

Installation

Overview

Preparing your computer for Ubuntu Studio is now simpler, with a wider range of disk setup options. Each of these are detailed at length to provide you with a clear understanding of the actions that will take place with your selection.

You can now reinstall or upgrade an existing copy of Ubuntu Studio with the Ubuntu Studio DVD installer, provided that your computer is connected to the Internet.

The minimum memory requirement for Ubuntu Studio 12.10 is 768 MB of memory. It is highly recommended that you have 2GB or more memory though so that the system will perform much better. More information about other recommended hardware on the new Ubuntu Studio website when it is released.

Upgrading

Upgrading from Ubuntu Studio 12.04

To upgrade from Ubuntu Studio 12.04, press Alt+F2 and type in "upgrade-manager"(without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and display following message: "New distribution release ’12.10′ is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions".

Since the upgrade does not include the new “photography” and “publishing” metas, so if you want the photography and publishing packages in your upgrade, please install them manually after upgrade by typing "sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-meta-photography ubuntustudio-meta-publishing" in your terminal.

Upgrading from Other Releases

Users of other Ubuntu Studio releases need to upgrade first to 12.04, and then to 12.10.

Proprietary drivers are now installed using software-properties-gtk (Software Sources), under the tab “Additional Drivers”.

Applications

Installation

We have received reports that booting the Ubuntu installer in UEFI mode from a USB disk on certain Samsung laptops (530U3C, NP700Z5C) may trigger a firmware bug that renders the machine unbootable. While this bug has not been confirmed to affect Ubuntu 12.10, users are advised to use caution when installing on Samsung laptops and ensure that they are configured for legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI mode. (1040557)

The consolidation of desktop installation media into a single image means that some installation options that were previously available on the alternate CD have no direct replacement on the desktop image.

Users who were installing using the alternate CD to install with LVM or full-disk encryption can now use the desktop image for this.

To install LTSP, please install using the Ubuntu Server 12.10 image, then add ltsp after installation. You can also continue to install with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS media and upgrade to 12.10 from there.

There are several options for installing using software RAID. You can:

install using the mini.iso, distributed from the ‘debian-installer’ directory on the mirrors;

install using the desktop CD and migrate the disks to RAID post-install;

The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the “Try Ubuntu without installing” boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

ARM OMAP4 machines will sometimes boot to a black screen during installation. It’s likely that the system has booted fine, but you will need to switch to another tty then back to tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then Alt+F7) to get graphics. (1065902)

On ARM Panda boards with no external storage attached, the installer interface will be confusing and installation is likely to fail. We strongly recommend attaching an external hard disk when installing on Panda boards. (1053030)

On a mac with an external display can not run in framebuffer mode error occurs on the 2nd reboot onwards. (1066883)

On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

On certain ASUS machines with AMD graphic chips, a WMI event and ACPI interrupt are sent at the same time when hitting the hotkey to change display mode, resulting in the display mode being changed twice in succession. Users can work around this using the Displays panel in System Settings for changing display modes. (1052278)

On ASUS N53SN laptops, the kernel does not boot without noefi on commandline. (1053897)

Networking

In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system’s /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

Libvirt

Windows vms which previously worked with ‘vga’ video now need ‘cirrus’ video.

Toolchain

Python 2.7.3 includes a fix for a security vulnerability affecting Python’s dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted, untrusted input could lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. Although disabled by default, vulnerable applications such as CGI scripts can explicitly enable “hash randomization” to prevent this exploit. Due to implementation details of this fix, virtualenvs created with older 2.7.x releases may not work with 2.7.3. Specifically, the os module may not appear to have a urandom function. This problem can be solved by recreating the broken virtualenvs with the newer Python 2.7.3 version. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 for full details. (954595)

VMware Player

Installing either version 4 or 5 of VMware Player on Ubuntu 12.10 will trigger a crash report regarding lsb_release, because the lsb_release command uses Python 3 but the VMware installation environment overrides the Python settings to point to a bundled version of Python 2. (938869) It is unknown what impact this has on VMware Player at runtime.

Trident Cyberblade – As the vesa driver doesn’t work with this chip-set the only solution is to remain with 12.04.

Intel i810 – A new install can only be accomplished from the Alternate ISO. On reboot go to Recovery Mode and delete/blacklist video driver. On reboot create suitable xorg.conf or use RandR to get correct resolution if necessary.

SiS 315 Series – As Intel i810

Support

Ubuntu Studio 12.10 is supported for 18 months.

Security and bugfix updates for Ubuntu Studio are provided by the Ubuntu Studio Team and Community